Branca de Neve and Three Films by Ute Aurand
28th of September - 11th of October
More Walser talk, I’m sorry…
Branca de Neve (João César Monteiro, 2000)
“the dead are very wrong to come back to life again”
- Colonel Chabert, Balzac
On Christmas day Nineteen Fifty-Six, Robert Walser left the sanotorium in Herisau and some way along the walk he took daily, collapsed dead in the snow. A series of stark black and white images capture the Swiss writer face down in the snow, his hat lying still, a metre or so away from his hand. These images follow the opening credits of Branca de Neve. Four photos of the body from different angles, the white snow disguising distance so that the wider photos place the body in strange comparison to dark constructs in the distance. A fifth captures the upturned face of Walser, his kindly, round eyes somewhat open, his mouth curled upward as if turning in exclamation; would the snowflakes lie on his face without melting? The black screen that follows these images lasts for almost the entirety of its runtime.
On an individual level there are two issues of practicality and technology in trying to watch Branca de Neve: the majority of the film, compromises a pure black image, bookended and interstitial with a few images, a canvas onto which a ‘radio-play’ of Robert Walser’s Branca de Neve — an anti-fairy tale version of Snow White — plays out. For those not fluent in Portuguese this results in a compromised experienced, not only is the black screen ruptured by the basically constant white of subtitles. But a purely auditory experience becomes one that is split between reading and listening. Famously Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet sought to, not bypass, but draw attention to this dilemma by occasionally allowing some passages to go by untranslated, stressing that likewise to read and not hear is an as important loss; that the auditory sensation of the spoken word can be meaningful and political beyond translation. A second issue is purely a visual, technological one. A celluloid black image can not be emulated by a digital screen, even less so outside of a dcp projector. I watched the film on my laptop; the TV in my household simply unable to render anything close to actual black, instead opting for a very dark brown with a constant shifting of digital artifacting.
These are the conditions under which I ‘watched’ Monteiro’s Branca de Neve. Whether we actually watch or hear (or read) Monteiro or Walser’s Branca de Neve, is a question that the text itself asks us, and something we can only answer ourselves. Having not previously read Walser’s anti-fairy tale play, on first contact the text itself is, frankly, overwhelming. Maybe the densest piece of writing I have ‘read’ by Walser and the one that seems to most deeply explore a ‘madness’ that goes unspoken but felt in so much of his writing. And yet there is a lucidness to the text; although the fairy-tale characters, in construct, are far more distant from the author than the narrator of much of Walsers short texts, the verbalised thoughts here, in pain with such a desire to see clearly and to somehow understand things apart from the blinding coils of ones own mind, ring far more personal than the strange little clerks who more readily invite biographical comparison. A reading that is clearly shared and invoked by Branca de Neve’s opening.
“Dead. That's what I am and always was. I've never known hot gusts of life, I am as still as yielding snow which lies supine for rays of sun to take it up. Thus I am snow and melt beneath the warming breath which wafts for spring and not for me.”
- Branca de Neve, Robert Walser
The play is largely a dialogue between Snow White, the Queen, Prince and Huntsman, loosely structured around three ‘games’ which all involve some form reenactment or retelling, all of which emphasise the schizophrenia of the work; the other fairy tale characters appearing somewhat as voices of Snow White’s interior. As Snow White voices an endless searching, from a point of clear disorientation. Seeking a ground from which to right herself; some form of balm for the illness within her:
“it always haunts my fearful mind and never, while I live and breathe, will I quite cleanse myself of it. It stains my heart with tarry black and muffles any joyous sound within my soul. I am so tired, that open coffin I would seek to lie in, an unfeeling form.”
These dialogues constitute a spiralling excavation of truth, reality and sanity, as they exist in the mind of ourselves and others, that ponders the repercussions of having broken the divide between life and death. If the boundary between our own life and death has been broken what does it mean for our conception of truth or reality, How do we parse these notions, if we are unable to distinguish if we are alive or dead? It’s dialogue opening in medias res where the fairy-tale ends with Snow White having been awakened and accusing the Queen; She is the dead returned to life, struggling to comprehend the awfulness of what the text recounts. The body of Walser has stood in for the, believed, dead body of Snow White and because of this presupposition Snow White now stands in for the presence of Walser, who through the vocalisation of his text is now a body reanimated. This death, and revival is what underpins the text. Itself a refiguring, and ultimately rejection, of the fairy tale itself.
At times Snow White is unwilling to believe the truth of the story, even when the Queen and Huntsman try to convince her of its validity, of their own evil and conspiracy. The voice of the Queen, always a contrary one, at times pleading innocence, then trying to convince Snow White of her innate evil. The first slip into relinquishing responsibility for understanding the world, and giving in to these voices occurs when rather than observe the scene in front of her she asks the Prince to describe the view of the park:
“No, you tell it. What do you see? And I will gather from your lips the picture's subtle lineaments. When you depict it you soothe the harshness of the view with judgment wise and shrewd.”
Like us Snow White is seeing black, an absence of images and must rely on the prince to tell the story, to communicate what has been hidden. We know the fairy tale and yet like Snow White begin to doubt our setting. The break between the fairy tale and Walser’s play and the one between Snow White’s mortality are essentially. Being forced to live on, past the point at which her narrative role within the fairy tale has ended, Snow White’s more modern, real self is unable to exist as a coherent identity and has now fractured along with the mirror that represents the simplistic duality of the fairy tale. There has been a break and the thinking mind labours at remaking a past that cannot be remade. Adrift on this uncertain estuary she eventually finds herself begging the huntsman lie to her, to give her some comfort, making an anticipatory announcement of her belief:
“Why, if you piled up fairy tales as high as heaven, tried lies on me palpably crude, grossly inept, I still would answer yes, forever yes… whatever you may think and speak my yes will stamp the truth on it. Speak, for within my trusting mind is held a captive, as it were, who longs to leave his fusty cell.”
This submission, not for the sake of true understanding but merely in hope of relief and quiet bliss. A simplifying act of rejection for thinking in favour of that which is more innate: belief and feeling. “sweet all-unknowing feeling bring. Hear what it says. Why, not a thing!”
All of this is played out to darkness only broken by brief interludes of the sky. Shot directly upward, a morass of faint light blue and white, with little to delineate the breaks between cloud and sky. The images soundtracked by a small cacophony of instruments, casting an odd, malevolent pall. One single interlude differs: a short pan of an excavation site. Out of the rock and mud we can see a series of raised foundations and ancient brick walls leading to what appears to be a stone bench. The immediate structures themselves recognisable but the space and nature of it remaining indecipherable. The shot directly precedes a play within the play; as the Queen requests that Snow White and the Huntsman recreate the past, to act out the show of mercy that led to her survival. They go through the motions, the huntsman speaking numbly. This the fairy tale they and we know and yet they are hesitant, unsure of it themselves. They have been ruptured from this past, they begin to doubt the validity of fairy tales.
As the characters reach a state of contentment, agreeing to each put their faith in a history and present that is different from what the old tale has told us, the misty sky we return to again and again undercuts or opposes the ‘pure blue sky’ that by the end of the play comes to embody this open, communally constructed post-fairy tale reality of trust and faith: “All is in harmony, my Lord, contention looks like skies of blue.” To reject image, and choose a different reality for oneself, the text succeeds. A peaceful alienation from a modern society which — like the break in Walser’s work between the original and retelling — encourages the discursive fragmentation of the schizophrenics mind. Monteiro’s skies however show an affinity and emphasis for the lone lingering note of pessimism in Walser’s text. The Prince, young, naive and boyish, who earlier served as the eyes for Snow White, remains unable to commit to the new communal reality. Wisping white in a blue sky. Lingering black doubt.
“Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song's design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines”
- Snow is Falling in Manhattan, David Berman
The final images of Branca de Neve are of Monteiro looking into the lens before disappearing out of shot. The second bookend, as the other author of this piece disappears. Where Walser’s text stands as a transgression of the original, led by the characters themselves, Monteiro’s work is only a light touch to the spine of Walser’s play, a necromancy, a refute that the author is dead; its most transgressive act to allege its psychological and personal underpinnings. An understanding, that for a writer whose words are so beguilingly evasive, few inhabit their works as fully as Walser, who directs his cane to the words that, like a frond or shell, curls into the smallest, most ornate ephemerality. Suffused with a feeling that this purple prosed lense focused intently on anything that came its way, so as to avoid seeing something large and dark; a space that remained, squat and imposing, on the periphery of his vision. Like the Kleist of his story, the unbearable impossibility of comprehending world in all it’s beauty and pain meant that to live easy and quietly he had to leave; to live out the last twenty-seven years of his life in institutions, constructing writing so small that it could not be read. Snow White describes her time with the dwarves, away from society, as one in which the absence of hate meant that she was not aware whether or not there was love, only content that it “dwelled in undisturbed serenity.”
Branca de Neve has been uploaded to youtube here
Three films by Ute Aurand: Am Meer (At the Sea) (1995), Kopfüber im Geäst (Hanging Upside Down in the Branches) (2009), Four Diamonds (2016)
A film can capture a day, but it takes something greater to communicate the sense of day; its energy, an unseen before and after, the day as experienced by several. Its a miraculous sensation that the delicate, sensory 16mm films of Ute Aurand swell with. To begin most simply with Am Meer; three minutes which progress through a sumptuous reverie of beach images that manage to replicate the dreamy haze one might enter as they close their salt tired eyes on the way home from the seaside. Key to the film, and all three works, is the sense that what has been captured, as well as being personal, is social more than it is environmental. The kaleidoscope of sand, sea and air only features a few glimpses of figures crossing a nearby pier but nonetheless the scene that is created is one that is being felt with others. The filmmaker never seems alone, either there is someone else out of view or we are there with her; they are open and present to the viewer, each film its own mutual commune. Retaining not only the feelings created by the experience but the delicacy borne of sharing it with someone. Two decades later Four Diamonds returns to similar ground; its first half capturing an intimate game of cards between four old women, radiating a hearth like warmth of comfort and easy harmony, while the second half moves to a Cape Cod beach as the genuine conversation of the card game plays on. Again the beach is a shared space, the intimacy of friends replaced by that of lovers. The water rolling across the sand a sensuous act heralding a hazy, too brief image of a companion walking towards the camera.
The achingly beautiful Kopfüber im Geäst accentuates both the temporal and social elements of Aurand’s work, resulting in a remarkable film worthy of deep reverence; a lifetime of relationships between parents and children as tapestry, weaved through a handful of moments in time. Each image profoundly evocative of age and distance: a hand held on an icy lake, a plastic ball passed to one another, the markings left by three removed picture frames on an otherwise clean white wall. Between these, pure, direct images are transitions, and multi-exposures that despite their astounding technical achievement are never ironic or witty, only rich in honesty. Faces and voices that remain imprinted as shadows and echoes. Again, in a film awash with deep personal grief, one is not struck with a sense of isolation. It is not a lonesome grief but one that, through all these fleeting moments and pain, is forever social; it exists within the relations of the living and dead, and shared by those of us who remain and watch.
Other films I watched in the last fortnight
Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) - This is a perfect screwball comedy starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It has more heart stopping moments of pathos than any other I’ve seen. It is a truly wonderful film I’m looking forward to hold with me for the rest of my life.
The Searchers* (John Ford, 1956) - Yes I watched this again. Would give a limb to be able to do a half decent John Wayne impression.
Baxter, Vera Baxter (Marguerite Duras, 1977) - The music in this hilarious, Duras one of cinema’s great trolls. Blanca said something about how this is about witches communing through time and that has stayed with me a lot more than the film itself.
Way My It Did I (Maria Anastassiou, 2020) - Short, gently probing documentary about migrant workers in Tilbury, focusing on community work within these groups and lightly highlighting a gap between the loud establishment driven pro-EU campaign and the more necessary practical work that is needed to protect these workers, families and communities. Shot on gorgeous 16mm with confidence enough to use the format for experimentation that might feel incongruous if done with less nuance.
Fuel (Yu Araki, 2019) - A slow portrait of a Hokkaido restaurant; at its centre a woman remains kneeled, statuesque, in front of a grill. The fire, relating an ethnic and universal history. In the sense that you get to watch a scallop cook in real time close up, this is very much James Devine cinema but I’m somewhat lukewarm on it. The end somewhat challenges the gentle meditative mood which is perhaps too easy to enjoy without thinking deeper.
i hope you and yours are all well
james xx
